brainrow

On the forty-fifth anniversary of his Mercury space flight, John Glenn talked about that flight in a crowded auditorium at COSI here in Columbus, Ohio.

Ohio governor Ted Strickland introduced Glenn with lavish praise. That prompted Glenn to recall an earlier occasion, when he had been introduced by someone who said, “There are very few authentic heroes in the world today, but our speaker tonight is one of them.”

Glenn said he’d been embarrassed by such praise, but on the way home he mused to his wife Annie, “You know, there really aren’t many real heroes in the world today.”

Annie replied, “You’re right, and I’ll tell you something: there’s one less than you think there is.”

He discussed his Mercury flight in some detail. He showed slides, including the first hand-held photo taken from earth orbit. At the time of Glenn’s flight, NASA didn’t have a photography department. They thought taking pictures would distract the astronaut from his other tasks. Glenn found a $45 Minolta camera with automatic film advance and persuaded NASA brass to let him take it along and take some pictures during his flight. (The photo shown here may not be the photo shown during the slide show. It was the closest match I found.)

He said several times that he felt fortunate to have had the opportunities to do the things he had done. He said he wasn’t the type of person to feel envious of others, but he might make an exception for Neil Armstrong.

Glenn was the oldest of the original seven Mercury astronauts. He became the oldest person to go into orbit in 1998 when he flew on Space Shuttle Discovery, when he was 77 years old. Now he is 85, and he still has the Right Stuff.

Via Corpus Callosum, how we do it in America:

It’s different in England:

[Prince] Harry, third in line to the throne behind father Prince Charles and older brother Prince William, graduated from the prestigious Sandhurst military academy last year and is expected to accompany his troops to Iraq in April or May, an unidentified military source told CNN….

Prince Harry, known as Troop Leader Wales, has trained to command 11 soldiers and four Scimitar tanks. The Daily Mail claimed Harry threatened to quit the army if he was prevented from joining his men on operations. …

Harry’s military service continues a royal family tradition….

His father, Prince Charles, was a pilot with the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy. Harry’s grandfather, Prince Philip, had a distinguished career in the Royal Navy. Harry’s uncle, Prince Andrew, was a Royal Navy pilot and served in the Falklands War against Argentina 25 years ago.

Let’s be fair here. If American leaders sent their own kids into battle, how many of these delightful wars of choice do you suppose we’d have? Why, we’d probably only go to war when we had to, and macho politicians can’t survive in an environment like that.

The Questionable Authority quotes M*A*S*H:

Frank: Well, everybody knows war is hell.

BJ: Remember, you heard it here last.

Hawkeye: War isn’t hell. War is war and hell is hell, and of the two war is a lot worse.

Father Mulcahy: How do you figure that, Hawkeye?

Hawkeye: Simple, father. Tell me, who goes to hell?

Mulcahy: Sinners, I believe.

Hawkeye: Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in hell. But war is chock full of them. Little kids, cripples, old ladies, in fact, except for a few of the brass almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.

M*A*S*H was a situation comedy about a mobile hospital unit during the Korean War.

Via The Frontal Cortex, an NPR story about growing smarter:

A new study in the scientific journal Child Development shows that if you teach students that their intelligence can grow and increase, they do better in school.

All children develop a belief about their own intelligence, according to research psychologist Carol Dweck from Stanford University.

“Some students start thinking of their intelligence as something fixed, as carved in stone,” Dweck says. “They worry about, ‘Do I have enough? Don’t I have enough?'”

…

So, about 100 seventh graders, all doing poorly in math, were randomly assigned to workshops on good study skills. One workshop gave lessons on how to study well. The other taught about the expanding nature of intelligence and the brain.

The students in the latter group “learned that the brain actually forms new connections every time you learn something new, and that over time, this makes you smarter.”

Basically, the students were given a mini-neuroscience course on how the brain works. By the end of the semester, the group of kids who had been taught that the brain can grow smarter, had significantly better math grades than the other group.

“When they studied, they thought about those neurons forming new connections,” Dweck says. “When they worked hard in school, they actually visualized how their brain was growing.”

This is better than the old rubber band analogy of the mind stretching to hold more and more knowledge. I always worried that my mind would snap, which is … uh, never mind.

Read Shakespeare. Listen to Beethoven. Study Michelangelo’s Pieta. Can these be the works of mortal human beings?

What are the limits of the mind’s power? How is it tapped? Might genius exist, suppressed, in every one of us? The depth, breadth and convolutions of the human mind are endlessly astonishing.

Via Neurontic:

I’ve spent a good chunk of time reading about autistics with peculiar gifts, but I’ve never seen a savant in action. (No. Rain Man doesn’t count.) And let me tell you, it’s enough to make you wonder if “normal” intelligence is all it’s cracked up to be. According to the voiceover, after just 45 minutes of surveying Rome from a helicopter, Wiltshire was able to faithfully recreate virtually everything he saw. His completed panorama stretched across 5 and half yards of paper. Even more impressive, Steven’s masterpiece required no preliminary sketching, or “roughing out of space.” “It [was as] if the panorama already [existed] in his head, with all the proportions, all the roads, all the details.”

Via Boing Boing, Colin Purrington offers some stickers for your textbooks.

Wording for the first disclaimer (top left) is taken verbatim from the sticker designed by the Cobb County School District (“A community with a passion for learning”) in Georgia, which actually plagiarized Alabama’s evolution disclaimer… Really, I’m not making any of this up. The other 14 are mildly educational variants that demonstrate the real meaning of a scientific “theory” as well as the true motivations of the School Board members and their creationist supporters.

There’s more — visit the site.

Oh, but I do like this song by Steeleye Span.

CNN Political Analyst Bill Schneider says Bush’s job approval rating is 32 percent, and I can’t help wondering — is it really possible that almost a third of Americans approve of this walking disaster? Are that many people crazy?

CNN runs lots of little online polls called QuickVotes. After recent Nascar cheating scandals, they asked “Is it ever OK to cheat?” “Yes” got 26 percent of the vote.

So here’s my theory: Bush’s honest approval rating is about six percent.

Now, that I can believe.

Via Atrios, USA Today founder Al Neuharth considers the worst president ever:

I remember every president since Herbert Hoover, when I was a grade school kid. He was one of the worst. I’ve personally met every president since Dwight Eisenhower. He was one of the best.

A year ago I criticized Hillary Clinton for saying “this (Bush) administration will go down in history as one of the worst.”

“She’s wrong,” I wrote. Then I rated these five presidents, in this order, as the worst: Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan, Ulysses Grant, Hoover and Richard Nixon. “It’s very unlikely Bush can crack that list,” I added.

Andrew Jackson? Really? Sure you didn’t mean Andrew Johnson?

I was wrong. This is my mea culpa. Not only has Bush cracked that list, but he is planted firmly at the top.

Hey, Bush still has almost two years to totally turn his administration around. He might turn out to be only the second or third worst president ever.

John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth on February 20, 1962. He rode in a Mercury capsule dubbed Friendship 7, launched atop an Atlas rocket at 9:47 AM EST.

Next Tuesday is the 45th anniversary of Glenn’s flight, and at 9:47 AM Glenn himself will talk about the flight at the Center of Science and Industry (COSI), 333 West Broad Street, here in Columbus, Ohio.

The event is called “Friendship 2007: A Conversation with John Glenn.” Tickets are required, but they’re free. They must be picked up at the John Glenn School of Public Affairs, room 350 Page Hall, 1810 College Road, on the Ohio State University campus. The phone number is (614) 292-4545.

I’m a Macintosh bigot, so I really enjoyed this. Via Discovering Biology in a Digital World, a hilarious demonstration of speech recognition in Microsoft Windows Vista:

We’re gonna do a little perl script using the Windows Vista software recognition to show you how easy it is.

(Warning: strong language.)

In fairness, the speech recognition seems to work really well. Programming may not be the best use of this technology, and this guy probably needs to learn a few new techniques to meet the computer half way… well, two-thirds of the way.

Have you ever had a creepy feeling that you were being watched? From Living the Scientific Life: the Helix Nebula.

And, from the New York Times, this completely unrelated article:

Why do we see faces everywhere we look: in the Moon, in Rorschach inkblots, in the interference patterns on the surface of oil spills? Why are some Lay’s chips the spitting image of Fidel Castro, and why was a cinnamon bun with a striking likeness to Mother Teresa kept for years under glass in a coffee shop in Nashville, where it was nicknamed the Nun Bun?

Compelling answers are beginning to emerge from biologists and computer scientists who are gaining new insights into how the brain recognizes and processes facial data.

Long before she had heard of Diana Duyser’s grilled-cheese sandwich, Doris Tsao, a neuroscientist at the University of Bremen in Germany, had an inkling that people might process faces differently from other objects. Her suspicion was that a particular area of the brain gives faces priority, like an airline offering first-class passengers expedited boarding.

“Some patients have strokes and are then able to recognize everything perfectly well except for faces,” Dr. Tsao said. “So we started questioning whether there really might be an area in the brain that is dedicated to face recognition.”

More here.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, by carefully inspecting every bite of food in order to make sure it wasn’t Jesus or somebody, I was eating a lot less and finally losing some weight. On the other hand, I feel more relaxed now without that creepy eye spying on me all the time.

Via The Frontal Cortex: Randy Newman defends America. (Warning: Randy is not worried much about being politically correct.)

Now, the leaders we have
While they’re the worst that we’ve had
Are hardly the worst this poor world has seen

…

The end of an empire
Is messy at best
And this empire’s ending
Like all the rest

I don’t think Abraham Lincoln would recognize today’s Republican Party. Today’s “Party of Lincoln” would reject Abe as a bleeding-heart. That doesn’t mean they don’t have use for him. Take Washington Times columnist Frank Gaffney:

Frank Gaffney, Jr. opened his latest column with this: “Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged.” — President Abraham Lincoln.

He continues: “It is, of course, unimaginable that the penalties proposed by one of our most admired presidents for the crime of dividing America in the face of the enemy would be contemplated — let alone applied — today. Still, as the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate engage in interminable debate about resolutions whose effects can only be to ‘damage morale and undermine the military’ while emboldening our enemies, it is time to reflect on what constitutes inappropriate behavior in time of war.”

One problem: Lincoln never said it.

Gaffney didn’t make it up. No, that was the work of another conservative writer, J. Michael Waller, writing in Insight magazine — a sister publication of the Washington Times.

Once the truth gets its boots on, it’s nice to know that so many of the pants that need a swift kick are gathered together in just a few convenient places.

Updates from Editor & Publisher: As of Thursday night, The Washington Times had neither removed the quote from the Gaffney column nor run a correction.

On Thursday, Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) cited the quote on the floor of the House during the debate on the Iraq war “surge.”

A small New Mexico radio station opts for higher standards of journalistic integrity than the big boys:

After the latest widely-publicized stories in national newspapers about weapons from Iran allegedly killing Americans in Iraq — based completely on unnamed sources — at least one smaller news outlet has had enough of it.

The news director of the public radio station in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has directed his staff to “ignore national stories quoting unnamed sources.” He also called on other news outlets to join this policy.

From Bill Dupuy’s memo:

Effectively immediately and until further notice, it is the policy of KSFR’s news department to ignore and not repeat any wire service or nationally published story about Iran, China, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia or any other foreign power that quotes an “unnamed” U.S. official.

…

This is a small news department with a small reach. We cannot research these stories ourselves. But we can take steps not to compromise our integrity. We should not dutifully parrot whatever comes out of Washington, on the wire or by whatever means, no matter how intriguing and urgent it sounds, when the source is unnamed.

It is said, “A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on.” Eventually, however, the truth gets its boots on, and the liars are due a sharp kick in the pants. For starters.